Ricky and I met with the Board and we kicked off the redesign process at the end of July. I asked the Board to specify requirements for the redesign, mentioning who the target audience for the redesigned pages was, and who the target audience was not.

Mel created a wiki project page to serve as a central place to store the documents and mockups related to the redesign project.

Sijis Aviles began completely rocking out the implementation of the spins site. I have to say, Sjis is a rockstar, TAKE NOTE. He put together cleanly templated pages that were true to the mockups, made sure everything was set up for localization, and made sure the various features (rotating banners and features) worked and got some assistance (thanks Seth!) to put together the top 5 downloaded spins widget and made sure it happened. Without him, this redesign would not have happened.

Next major kudos goes to the Fedora Design team. They totally rocked out. I posted a desperate plea to the design team mailing list for help in putting together screenshots for the many games in the Games spin. On short notice, we got 99 screenshots for the Games Spin, with more on the way. Kudos to Charlie Brej, Patrick Connelly, Hisham Abdel-Magid, Hector Gomez, and Ryan Lerch who all pitched in!

We missed the string freeze for get.fedoraproject.org and that redesign ended up getting pushed back to post-F12, since the complication of managing two different themes/styles on the websites was too much in the time we had. But look for those changes coming soon.

The site went live this week – thanks to Ricky for helping us push the site out on F12 release day!

I’m sure I’m forgetting some items and deserved kudos (let me know and I’ll update this post) but I have to leave for my bus now so that’s all for now. I hope this gives you some insight into a community design & implementation process. 🙂

And check out spins.fedoraproject.org and let us know what you think! We’re of course always open to improvements – this is an open design process. 🙂 Also note there is more work to be done – let me know if you’ve any interest in helping out 🙂

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About Máirín Duffy

Máirín is a principal interaction designer at Red Hat. She is passionate about software freedom and free & open source tools, particularly in the creative domain: her favorite application is Inkscape. You can read more from Máirín on her blog at blog.linuxgrrl.com.

Discussion

7 thoughts on “New Fedora Spins site with Fedora 12”

“Pre-facelift spins.fedoraproject.org.”

That link is incorrect. I think we should push out the new look for get.fp.o much before the Fedora 13 release. Trying to do it just before release makes things get pushed out further, again and again. A couple of weeks from now, would be a very good time, me thinks.

A couple weeks from now isn’t going to happen 🙂 But maybe 6-8 weeks is doable.

I agree though, after having get.fpo, spins.fpo, and Fedora Insight all synced up with F12’s release date, it was just not possible. It was too much work all at the same time. So I’d like to see us get the new fpo design out well before F13.

Couple of weeks or six weeks doesn’t matter particularly. My point was that: don’t do it now because everyone is downloading Fedora 12 and a screwup would have a large impact. Don’t do it just because Fedora 13 release because again,a screwup would have a large impact. Somewhere in between is fine.

For the KDE page on spins.fp.o, would it be possible to also somehow mention the mirror links in the Download tab? But I know this would be a special case for the KDE spin only (the other stuff on spins.fp.o doesn’t get mirrored), so if this is too much work for the one spin, I’ll accept that. I just think it’d be nice to offer the option.

Thanks for offering the historical retrospective on the websites redesign – this is a great “how things work in Fedora” story.

Since we’re going to have to go through a similar process to finish up the rest of the websites (as you and the others above have pointed out already), is there anything else about the process (other than “avoid last minute everything-at-once workdeath”) you’d like to change? I know for FI, I’m going to try to assign individuals to host worksprints (instead of assigning individuals to simply do tasks) so we can get things done together faster – many hands make light work, and it’s also just more fun.